I have for some time now tried to get games like Team Fortress 2 and Mirror’s Edge to run in Linux Mint 10 64-bit through Wine. However, it haven’t gone very well so I’m only able to play them with really, really bad performance. But maybe will some of the stuff that I found help somebody else, so I will post what I found in this blog post. The graphics card that I have is an Asus Radeon HD 6870, and the driver is the proprietary display driver (CCC 11.5) found on amd.com.

My games won’t start – nothing happens

Try to update your system with aptitude. That was what solved the problem for me.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install
sudo aptitude upgrade

(Not really sure why sudo aptitude install installed some updates when I first ran it)

No direct rendering

I had the problem that running glxinfo | grep direct in the terminal returned the following line:

direct rendering: No (LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT set)

However, if I ran it with sudo (sudo glxinfo | grep direct), it returned:

direct rendering: Yes

• Here is a link to a thread with somebody having the same problem. The first possible solution that is given in this thread is to add the following lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

  Section    "DRI"
  Group      "video"
  Mode       0660
  EndSection

• The second one that is given in the thread is to add your user account to the video group. To find where you do this, open the MintMenu and search for Users and Groups.
• Another suggestion that I found was to type this line into the command line:

  unset LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT

  This did only work for me in the current open terminal window. So when I opened a new one, it went back to saying No.

• The final solution, that actually worked for me, was to disable the Compiz desktop effects.

Here is the thread where I got to know much of the stuff above: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?p=61294. But as I said, I still have pretty bad performance in my games and I’m to lazy to fix it. I think I will keep on gaming on Windows, and doing all other stuff on Linux.